Spatially-constrained clustering of ecological networks

Spatial ecological networks are widely used to model interactions between georeferenced biological entities (e.g., populations or communities). The analysis of such data often leads to a two-step approach where groups containing similar biological entities are firstly identified and the spatial information is used afterwards to improve the ecological interpretation. We develop an integrative approach to retrieve groups of nodes that are geographically close and ecologically similar. Our model-based spatially-constrained method embeds the geographical information within a regularization framework by adding some constraints to the maximum likelihood estimation of parameters. A simulation study and the analysis of real data demonstrate that our approach is able to detect complex spatial patterns that are ecologically meaningful. The model-based framework allows us to consider external information (e.g., geographic proximities, covariates) in the analysis of ecological networks and appears to be an appealing alternative to consider such data.